The effects of awareness and secondary task demands on Stroop performance in the pre-cued lists paradigm

When global and local information about attentional demands collide: evidence for global dominance

This study investigated how global and local information about attentional demands influence attentional control, with a special interest in whether one information source dominates when they conflict. In Experiment 1, we manipulated proportion congruence in two blocks (i.e., mostly congruent versus mostly incongruent) of a Stroop task to create different global demands (i.e., low versus high, respectively). Additionally, we created different local demands by embedding 10-trial lists in each block that varied in their proportion congruence (10% to 90% congruent), and half the lists were preceded by a valid precue explicitly informing participants of upcoming attentional demands. Stroop effects were smaller in mostly incongruent compared with mostly congruent blocks demonstrating the influence of global information. Stroop effects also varied according to the proportion congruence of the abbreviated lists and differed between cued and uncued lists (i.e., cueing effect), demonstrating the influence of local information. Critically, we found that global and local information interacted, such that the cueing effect differed between the two blocks. While there was evidence that participants used the precue to relax control for mostly congruent lists within the mostly congruent block, the cueing effect was absent within the mostly incongruent block. In Experiment 2, we replicated the latter pattern and thereby provided further evidence that participants do not use local precues to relax control when attentional demands are globally high. The findings suggest that both global and local information sources influence the control of attention, and global information dominates local expectations when the information sources collide.

Performance feedback promotes proactive but not reactive adaptation of conflict-control

Cognitive control refers to the use of internal goals to guide how we process stimuli, and control can be applied proactively (in anticipation of a stimulus) or reactively (once that stimulus has been presented). The application of control can be guided by memory; for instance, people typically learn to adjust their level of attentional selectivity to changing task statistics, such as different frequencies of hard and easy trials in the Stroop task. This type of control-learning is highly adaptive, but its boundary conditions are currently not well understood. In the present study, we assessed how the presence of performance feedback shapes control-learning in the context of item-specific (reactive control, Experiments 1a and 1b) and list-wide (proactive control, Experiments 2a and 2b) proportion of congruency manipulations in a Stroop protocol. We found that performance feedback did not alter the modulation of the Stroop effect by item-specific cueing, but did enhance the modulation of the Stroop effect by a list-wide context. Performance feedback thus selectively promoted proactive, but not reactive, adaptation of cognitive control. These results have important implications for experimental designs, potential psychiatric treatment, and theoretical accounts of the mechanisms underlying control-learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The unique effects of relatively recent conflict on cognitive control

In tasks like Stroop, it is well documented that cognitive control is affected by experiences with past conflict on 2 timescales. The "immediate" timescale is evidenced by congruency sequence effects while the "long" timescale is evidenced by list-wide proportion congruence effects. What remains underspecified is whether relatively recent experiences with conflict (i.e. recent timescale of a few preceding trials) also uniquely affect control and how experiences on different timescales are weighted. We conducted 3 preregistered experiments using a novel Stroop paradigm designed to isolate the effects of the recent timescale and measured cognitive control via diagnostic items. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the level of conflict experienced in the recent timescale within mostly congruent and mostly incongruent lists. Controlling for conflict experiences in the long and immediate timescales, we found that conflict in the recent timescale affected cognitive control and did so similarly across list types. In Experiment 2 we found a boundary condition for the effects of recent conflict -when the recent timescale was preceded by 50% congruent trials, conflict in the recent timescale did not affect cognitive control. Experiment 3 systematically replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and demonstrated that conflict in the recent timescale affected cognitive control even after a long unfilled delay between recent conflict and subsequent diagnostic trials. These novel findings expand understanding of how conflict experiences in the recent timescale affect cognitive control and highlight the need to expand theories of cognitive control to incorporate the recent timescale and its interaction with other timescales. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The flexibility of cognitive control: Age equivalence with experience guiding the way

Prior research has shown that aging is accompanied by changes in cognitive control. Older adults are less effective in maintaining an attentional bias in favor of goal-relevant information and are less flexible in shifting control relative to younger adults. Using a novel variant of the Stroop color-naming task, we tested the hypothesis that age-related differences in the flexible shifting of control may be small or absent when control is guided by experience (i.e., environmental input guiding attention). Younger and older adults named the color of color words in abbreviated lists of trials. In Experiment 1, experience within the early segment of the list was manipulated to encourage adoption of more (mostly congruent condition) or less (mostly incongruent condition) attention toward the word. More important, the middle and late portions were 50% congruent in both conditions. Older adults, like younger adults, demonstrated flexible acquisition and shifting of control settings (i.e., relative attention to word vs. color information). In Experiment 2 we replicated this finding. Additionally, we found that both age groups flexibly acquired and shifted control settings for "transfer" items (i.e., items that were 50% congruent in all lists and list segments), pointing to a generalizable (i.e., global) form of control rather than an item-specific mechanism. Discussion focuses on the role of experience-guided control in enabling flexible performance in older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record